In the electronics art, smaller often means better. In the quest to provide smaller electronic appliances, the electronics industry seeks electronic components that are smaller than predecessor components.
The capacitor (a dielectric material sandwiched between two conductors) represents one electronic component that has substantially shrunk in this quest. However, current practice relies largely on individually mounting each capacitor onto solder paste on the surface of a circuit board and reflow soldering the capacitors. Despite the advances in capacitor miniaturization, each surface mounted capacitor still occupies a significant fraction of the circuit board surface area, and requires substantial cost to “pick and place” onto the board. For example, a typical cellular phone contains over 200 surface mounted capacitors connected to circuit boards by over 400 solder joints. The ability to integrate or embed capacitors in circuit boards during manufacture of the circuit boards would provide substantial space and cost savings over surface mounted capacitors. Unfortunately, efforts to make capacitors that can be integrated or embedded into circuit boards have either produced capacitors that do not have sufficient capacitance (e.g. <10 pF/mm2) to replace many of the capacitors (e.g., requiring >100 pF capacitance) on a circuit board, or have resulted in structures and processes that have not been scaled up to manufacturing volumes.
Printed circuit boards typically comprise multiple layers of copper and glass-reinforced epoxy or other polymer. The copper is patterned to form the conducting elements of the circuit, and the polymer provides dielectric isolation and mechanical robustness. Polymers are low dielectric constant materials, and therefore parallel plate embedded capacitors formed within the polymer dielectric circuit board do not offer high capacitance density.
Although ceramic dielectrics that have very high dielectric constants are available, they are typically too rigid to be mechanically compatible with organic printed circuit boards. Further, organic printed circuit boards are incompatible with the methods used to form the ceramic dielectric films. Ceramic dielectric films are commonly formed by a broad range of deposition techniques, such as chemical solution deposition (CSD), evaporation, sputtering, physical vapor deposition and chemical vapor deposition. However, in order to achieve the requisite dielectric structure, such techniques typically require either a high-temperature deposition or a high-temperature crystallization. Such temperatures would melt, ignite or otherwise degrade the organic materials in the circuit board substrate.
Furthermore, these processes are incompatible with copper. At the high temperatures and oxidizing conditions needed to form the ceramic dielectric, copper oxidizes at the interface between the ceramic dielectric and the copper. This effectively forms an interface layer that will degrade the overall device performance, thus negating any advantage gained by the use of the ceramic dielectric. The copper would not oxidize as readily in a reducing atmosphere, but such an atmosphere would produce excessive defect concentrations in the dielectric oxide layer and may frustrate phase formation. Also, the copper would not oxidize as readily at lower temperatures, but efforts to form ceramic films at temperatures that are compatible with circuit board components have generally compromised the dielectric properties of the resulting ceramic. For ceramic dielectrics, it is apparent that favorable dielectric properties are intimately linked to a complex crystal structure (e.g., perovskite) that is difficult to develop at lower temperatures.
Dielectric oxides such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and lead lanthanum zirconate titanate (PLZT) belong to a particularly promising class of high permittivity ceramic dielectrics with the perovskite crystal structure. When formed by the CSD process, dielectric oxides can be made into very thin, flexible, robust layers with very high dielectric constants.
Several methods have been proposed to create a thin structure that is intended to be added to a circuit board using compatible circuit board layering techniques, by adding a thin coating of dielectric oxide to a thin foil of copper. Although some aspects of how such a material would be manufactured, integrated into a circuit board structure, and patterned have been described, improvements that use these methods in unique ways for a wide variety of applications are desirable.
What is needed is a structure and process for adding capacitors formed of high dielectric constant materials to rigid or flexible circuit boards that are economical to manufacture and wherein the structure is in a form compatible with multilayer circuit board fabrication techniques that are in wide use today.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.